Violence, Conflict, and Historical Reconciliation in Cultural Production: Colombia in Transition

Abstract

This dissertation explores cultural narratives that challenge the traditional historiographic approach to violence in Colombia since the 1980s onwards. Utilizing a diverse theoretical toolkit (e.g., Rama; Rancière; Nietzsche; Benjamin), I reframe the way in which violence has been historicized by examining contemporary works of literature, art, performance, and film that shed light on the role of cultural production in national processes of historical reconstruction, reparation, and reconciliation. My analysis focuses on the symbolic mechanisms through which Colombian recent cultural production has reinterpreted the past vis-á-vis the prospect of a transitional project that is constantly evolving amidst the continuation of conflict. This approach illuminates the political challenges inherent in a project of national reconciliation whose evolution depends largely on the discursive articulations around a past that is far from being collectively recognized as overcome. Drawing from Andreas Huyssen’s (2003) critique of the “hypertrophy of memory” in contemporary societies, it is my contention that the cultural production analyzed in this dissertation resists that hypertrophy by aesthetically exploring the ethical function of memory and history in the configuration of non-hegemonic cultural narratives about a past that continues to shape the present. In the chapters that follow, I examine the ways in which Colombian recent cultural production critiques that hegemonic narrative by exploring the symbolic ramifications of violence beyond the armed conflict itself.

Chapter 1 examines literary fiction that destabilizes the tenets of the Latin American lettered elite amidst sociopolitical unrest, as attested in novels by Antonio Caballero and Fernando Vallejo such as Sin remedio and La virgen de los sicarios. Drawing from Ángel Rama’s critical approach to the “lettered city,” it is my contention that these novels move away from a sociological approach to violence to examine non-hegemonic ways of understanding the relationship between history and literary fiction. Chapter 2 explores the political pop art of Beatriz González (e.g., Decoración de interiores; Auras anónimas) as an alternative mode of historical reconstruction in the aftermath of traumatic events, thus shedding light on how the forms of perception promoted by the aesthetic regime (Rancière 2004) can open horizons of historical elucidation that break away from the historiographical narrative to promote a collective memory based on empathy and affect. Chapter 3 examines the performances of Mapa Teatro—an art and theater collective that challenges the hegemonic history of Colombia through on-stage refashioning of testimony and archival memory in plays like Los incontados and Testigo de las ruinas. As I intend to show in this chapter, the counter-cartographies of violence proposed by that collective create non-linear temporalities that reveal the presence of the past in the present. Chapter 4 explores recent cinema productions such as Laura Mora’s Matar a Jesús and César Augusto Acevedo’s La tierra y la sombra that expose structural violence in Colombia through an affect-oriented approach to filmmaking. I pay special attention to the articulation in Colombian recent film production of a diversity of visual grammars that share an ethical commitment to filming violence as a structural, unresolved phenomenon that necessarily concerns the present. Based on a genealogical analysis of these cultural narratives, I argue that contemporary Colombian cultural production has appropriated violence and conflict to defy hegemonic discourses on memory, historical truth, human rights, and transitional justice, thus reconfiguring the role of the arts in the articulation of new modalities of historical reconstruction.